online-abuse – The Establishment

Our Usernames, Ourselves: How Anonymity Shaped The Internet (And Me)

The Establishment — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 19:12:11 +0000

At 8 years old, my birth name was the furthest thing from my mind. Here I was, given the God-like power of choosing my identity. It was a special kind of mask.

The internet was once a gaping void — meaningless, malleable lines of rudimentary code filled with unexplored potential. These liminal spaces between these HTML strokes were once so far removed from real life, it was as though anything said or done on the internet existed on another plane entirely. It was a veritable tabula rasa for one’s entire being; a chance to start afresh without packing up, moving to Wisconsin, and starting a free-form jazz sextet.

With time, the internet, like the viscous ooze it is, shaped itself to fill the molds and gaps of our real lives, and thus our online identities fused with our actual selves. As our virtual personae gave way to the real/virtual hybrid creatures we now know as humans, one significant artifact of the early internet was seemingly lost forever: the username.

Presently, my digital being is marked by a series of @katiefustich’s, and I can’t help but notice the increasing frequency with which my peers — particularly those in media, tech, and the arts (fields more prone to individual “branding”) — are shirking their digital aliases in favor of striking a similarly straightforward tone. True, perhaps there is the occasional number added to the end of a legal name for differentiation purposes, but even that looks oddly out of place next to the clean and simple identifiers that follow one from Twitter to Instagram and back.

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The rationale behind being visible and invisible online has seemingly polarized since its inception. Now, the presence of veritable identities in online spheres consistently promotes vital conversations about identity politics. On the other hand, those who choose to remain aggressively anonymous online often do so for the more sinister purposes of engaging in cyberbullying or spewing hate speech. Yet, at one time, the username was a different kind of mask.

I was 8 years old on the first day my parents first plugged our cow-printed Gateway Computer into the phone. After a succession of aggressive beeps and whirrs emanated from the machine, I was granted the privilege of making my own AOL account. (RIP, AOL Instant Messenger.)

Selecting my user icon and away message were impossibly easy tasks (Sailor Moon and a Spongebob Squarepants quote, naturally). These things were fleeting, malleable. I could change them at the will of my American Girl doll and/or anime preferences. But when it came to fashioning my username — something so permanent, so eternally representational of me as an individual — I knew more serious considerations had to be made.

Naturally, my birth name was the furthest thing from my mind. Here I was, given the God-like power of choosing my identity, even if that identity was restricted to the AOL: Just For Kids chatroom. A username had to be witty, I thought. It had to say everything about me in as few characters as possible. It was a chance to be born again. Needless to say, the username I typed into the text box that day was none other than “RingoSpecs99.”

The username was once a different kind of mask.
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A close reading of that username reveals I, at the tender and very confused age of 8, believed Ringo Starr to be the superior member of the Beatles. I had also just been prescribed glasses and was very mistakenly excited about this life development, hence the “specs” elements (being short for “spectacles”). The 99 at the end? Naturally a shout out to the jersey number of Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time.

You are correct if you read that explanation as a truncated blueprint for one horribly awkward and oft-mocked elementary school student. Yet, online, it seemed okay to acknowledge elements of my personality that were — unbeknownst to me — blatantly lame. It was a safe, anonymous world where I was free to be the most distilled version of my youthful self.

As I grew from child to adolescent, how I chose to demarcate myself virtually only became more cringe-worthy. With the birth of sites like Neopets, Livejournal, and Xanga during my gloriously goth pre-teen years came usernames like “away_from_you” (developed during a Bright Eyes listening session that lasted a fortnight), “xxguchachaxx” (a very, very deep reference from bad translations of Sailor Moon manga), and “metalmouthsweetie” (I thought getting braces meant I was cute [???]).

A few of my friends let the same username trail them from age 10 and into high school, never envisioning themselves as anything other than “SoccerGirl91” and the like. Others took a more spastic approach, creating tons of usernames due to a mixture of forgetfulness and ADHD. Yet each time a new website presented me with a blank textbox requesting a username, I felt the rush of a miniature reinvention. The endless possibilities allowed me to make who I thought I was — or at the very least, the cartoon characters I aspired to be — a more real aspect of my daily life.

Though now lampooned, these veiled versions of myself created unexpected room for growth. On sites like LiveJournal, I explored my feelings in a setting that felt safe from the judgment of my family and friends. On Deviant-Art, I offered up my rudimentary oil paintings to the surprisingly kind-hearted judgment of total strangers who were in search of similar validation. I felt like I was in on some kind of secret — while my peers in “real life” relied on the critique of exhausted teachers or confused parents, I believed I had cultivated another self in another world where people took me, a serious person, seriously. Never mind the fact that all my aforementioned real-life peers likely had similar escapist versions of themselves.

Yet not all good Will and Grace-centric FanFiction.net accounts are slated for eternity. While there’s no quantifiable moment the internet shifted from experimental space into, arguably, a vital extension of real life, there are many quantifiable reasons for the shift.

As writer and internet scholar Whitney Phillips explains to me, platforms like Facebook put indirect pressure on their users to utilize real information, and real names in particular, when crafting profiles. “If your profile name or picture is recognized as being inaccurate, your account can be deleted without warning,” Phillips explains. While Facebook promotes this pressure as “better enabling users to connect authentically,” Phillips says the site keeping its users “real” better enables them to efficiently sell this very real information to advertisers.

Zuckerberg and company aren’t the only ones in on this whole commodification of identity thing, though. Through other social media platforms, like Instagram, people have realized that if they are good enough at taking selfies or writing poetry using only leaves, they can make a living by posting the occasional sponsored ad for Detox Tea. In this scenario, the user becomes hyperreal. They’re so popular — ostensibly for being themselves — they become a kind of vessel for strangers to fill with their own desire.

For the rest of us (those unworthy of casually peddling teeth-whitening serum), we must be content to strike a balance between our true selves, and the selves we want others to believe we are. Gone are the extreme emotional torrents of my LiveJournal poetry, hello is the eternity of over-analyzing my use of internet slang in a Tweet in order to achieve an absurdly niche intellectual-comedic effect.

I say this, and yet I am admittedly disturbed when I search an individual only to find that their online identity is not in sync with their actual being. Who are they trying to fool? How do they think they could ever peel apart the two into something distinct? Humans are the internet; all we can do is articulate the way that others consume us through the medium. How could one resist the obsessive grooming of such an opportunity?

Phillips explains to me that there are many less-casual spheres in which online pseudonymity persists. “Being anonymous online is not any less common, it’s just less readily visible,” she says. It will come as no surprise to any marginalized individual that modern-day online anonymity often takes the form of hate speech, personal attacks, and associations with known violent organizations. Neo-nazi hubs like 4Chan and the Daily Stormer are littered with pseudonyms as vivid as any Club Penguin chat room circa 2006.

Shockingly, these individuals don’t make use of usernames out of shame or fear of public ousting. “Research shows that being anonymous doesn’t motivate people to be violent,” Phillips says. “It’s actually being part of a group.”

Humans *are* the internet.
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Phillips points me to the “BBC Prison Study,” a controversial project conducted by psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher that was intended to unearth new findings about power imbalances and group dynamics. Before the study, the pair of researches anticipated a correlation between anonymity and violence. Instead, the two observed it wasn’t anonymity that emboldened one to commit an act of violence, but the presence of a group. In fact, those observed were more keen on not remaining anonymous in order to receive more personal validation from others in the group, whom they hoped to impress.

Several times I have given into the temptation of crafting a new online self that is free of the restrictions of my true self online. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles, I created an alternative Instagram account, dedicated to my more base indulgences like sunset and taco photography. Though liberating at first, this sub-account quickly developed into a chore; another persona to diligently prune. The only difference in the concentrated effort placed on my two accounts was that my “fake” one was only viewed by total strangers as opposed to cute girls I wanted to be my friends in real life.

Whereas I had once yearned for the blind approval of other blank faces in the crowd, I now felt bored by their very presence. My brainwashing was irreversible — could I ever again be truly free on the internet?

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The username will forever remain one of the internet’s most precious artifacts. They are today’s cave paintings at Lascaux; runes for divination by future scholars; vital pieces of an era when something that now consumes — and even controls — our lives was merely an aspect of it.

I dream of a future in which the internet becomes so all-encompassing, so separated from simply human and screen, that the username will rise again. Once more, people will choose to be anyone but themselves on the internet. Or, more accurately, be exactly who they really are.

The Strange, Sad Case Of Laci Green

Katelyn Burns — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 02:45:42 +0000

She built a community to protect the abused. Now she’s on the side of the abusers. What happened to YouTuber Laci Green?

Prior to her “red pilling,” Laci Green’s secret anti-harassment Facebook group provided support to those abused by trolls.

Anyone who’s marginalized knows the dangers of online harassment — and YouTuber Laci Green, who rose to prominence by conducting online sex education content on behalf of Planned Parenthood and Discovery News, has faced some of the worst of it. In addition to the usual vile comments and death threats, she’s contended with physical harm as well, in the form of objects thrown in her direction during speaking engagements.

According to a large Pew Research Center study, Green’s experience is startlingly common: 73% of adult online users have seen harassment happen to someone else, while 40% have experienced it themselves (with marginalized creators facing a disproportionate amount of abuse). In light of this, last December, Green decided to take matters into her own hands by starting a secret Facebook group to share resources, tips, and blocklists in order to deal with abuse. She also shared various methods for filtering out abusive comments with YouTube’s new comment moderation system.

73% of adult online users have seen harassment happen to someone else, while 40% have experienced it themselves.
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Her influence in this space has been considerable — with 1.5 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, a lot of people listen to what Green has to say. Last year, she was even named one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by Time.

All of which makes her recent turn deeply troubling.

In late May, seemingly out of the blue, Green dramatically shifted her tone on harassment. Where once she supported the abused, she suddenly began questioning why there’s “more than two genders” and arguing that “both sides of the argument are valid” for everything from racism to transphobia to misogyny. In a stunning example of her newfound hypocrisy, she called feminist YouTuber and fellow member of her anti-harassment Facebook group Kat Blaque a “sociopath,” and earlier this month, she tweeted the following:

civil dissent is not harassment. conflict =/= abuse. hurt feelings =/= trauma. overstating harm comes at the expense of survivors. #message

???@gogreen18

In a series of videos, Green revealed that her shift was a result of “red pilling,” the term for a twisted Matrix-inspired recruitment process coined by men’s rights advocates, pick-up artists, and the “alt right.” The process involves a recruiter who attempts to position white supremacists as oppressed truth tellers while spinning phony racial and gender science as “free speech” that’s being trampled on by feminists and the political left.

Green, it seems, was red-pilled after appearing in a debate with the prominent anti-feminist Blaire White, a trans woman, alt-right anti-feminist, and generally vile YouTuber who has said that trans women who get beat up or murdered deserve it for “tricking men,” fat people should be shamed until they lose weight, and refugees should be gassed (White has deleted the latter tweet since publication, but the archived version can be viewed here). While it appears that Green’s appearance on White’s channel marked an important milestone in Green’s “red pilling,” her turn may also be related to a relationship she formed with anti-feminist YouTuber Chris Ray Gun, who made a video last year saying those condemning Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” comments were “missing chromosomes,” and has claimed that white supremacists are just being funny.

Prior to her “red pilling,” Laci Green’s secret anti-harassment Facebook group provided support to those abused by trolls.

In any case, that someone so influential in the progressive online space could make such a complete 180 has shaken the social justice community to its core. How could a defender of equality change so much, so quickly? And what does it mean for those who had come to trust Green’s safe space online?

The answers to these questions are chillingly incomplete — and raise questions anew about the safety of online spaces for those who routinely face harassment.

To understand the gravity of Green’s shift, it’s important to grasp how online harassment has evolved over the years — and how profound its dangers can be.

When Green created her anti-harassment Facebook group, it was largely in response to the rising trend of “response videos,” YouTube videos created by trolls who have devoted their lives to attacking feminist content. Creators of these videos often claim that their content does not itself constitute harassment, while simultaneously ignoring the actions of their followers, who frequently bombard their targets with an overwhelming number of slurs and violent messages.

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Lindsay Amer, a queer YouTuber who has experienced response videos firsthand, explains:

“You see these anti-feminist YouTubers who gain hundreds of thousands of followers in under a year. I think there’s a lot of money in anti-feminism. The content is really easy to make and it doesn’t have to be high quality. Someone can just turn on a camera and rant and say something controversial and know that it’s going to get a ton of views. I see people who recut my videos with their bullying commentary added.”

Troublingly, up until recently, such videos were not only supported by YouTube, but incentivized. Because response videos are so easy to make, it was easy for reactionary YouTubers to churn out a lot of content, which YouTube then prioritized in an algorithm that favored prolific output, high view counts, and abundant comments — even if those comments were toxic. Gaming the very closely held secret of the YouTube algorithm became a de facto path to internet stardom, and the format was perfect for response-video creators. Even after changes to their algorithm in December of last year, YouTube has continued to discourage vloggers from preventing harassment — according to Amer, when users disable comments and the sidebar for other suggested videos, their content is less likely to be promoted by the algorithm, and their view counts plummet.

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Amer explains how these response videos can in turn breed serious abuse. After uploading her first video on her YouTube channel “Queer Kids Stuff,” she was surprised to see it take off — but after it was picked up by the Nazi “alt-right” website Daily Stormer, she was swiftly confronted with a slew of response videos. In turn, she says, the audiences of the YouTubers who created those videos “came at my channel and abused me and my followers”; the harassment included pictures of nooses, death threats, and anti-Semitic messages about ovens, showers, and being gassed.

Moreover, this abuse isn’t always “just” virtual — often, the threat can become physical. Just last weekend, for example, abusive YouTubers made their presence known at Vidcon in Anaheim, California, the largest online video convention in the world. During the panel “Women Online,” response-video trolls occupied the entire front two rows of the venue in order to harass the panelists in person. Eventually, feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian exclaimed to Carl Benjamin, a troll popularly known as “Sargon of Akkad”:

“You make your name on YouTube by making these dumbass videos that just say the same shit over and over again. I hate to give you attention because you’re a garbage human, whatever dude.”

Sarkeesian’s comment, which elicited a gasp from the audience, was rooted in a long and ugly history; over the last two years, Sarkeesian’s name or appearance has been displayed in roughly 20 video titles or thumbnails on Benjamin’s channel.

Benjamin especially likes to gripe about Sarkeesian’s speaking fees and the amount of money she makes — neglecting to mention that, in reality, she has had to cancel speaking events due to death threats. Meanwhile, according to a 2015 article by Daily Kos, Benjamin makes about $1.50 per thousand views on his YouTube channel. Assuming those numbers are still accurate, that would mean his latest video on the fallout from his Vidcon encounter with Sarkeesian has netted him about $546 in just three days. Benjamin also makes over $5,500 a month on Patreon, a website for creators to find funding. (Multiple efforts to seek comment from Benjamin for this story went unanswered, with several of his Twitter followers making accusations of bias.)

In a statement released on their official Medium account today, comments attributed to Vidcon founder Hank Green (no relation to Laci) addressed the controversy from this weekend, noting:

“He [Hank Green] apologized to her [Sarkeesian] for not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for.”

But this comment is difficult to believe given that this type of trolling is becoming more commonplace. In March of this year, a panel led by political activist Cenk Uygur at SXSW was crashed by alt right troll Steven Crowder in order to generate content for Crowder’s YouTube channel, an incident which was only really covered by the right wing press. Even Laci Green’s boyfriend got into the act the day before the Sarkeesian/Benjamin conflict by filming a Kat Blaque panel for retweets. The problem has been prominent enough that, according to a screenshot, Laci Green herself emailed YouTube staff about the presence of certain YouTubers at VidCon just a few months ago.

In a Facebook post, Laci said she reached out about certain YouTubers appearing at Vidcon.

All of which brings us back to Laci Green’s surprising transformation. It was response videos that first prompted Amer to connect with Green, which in turn led to the formation of the anti-harassment Facebook group. Until it was shut down in June as a result of Green’s red-pilling, that group provided some of the best support online for those facing virtual and physical threats as a result of their views and identity.

To be fair, of course, online harassment is extremely complex, and hardly solely the fault of Green — and to be quite honest, I couldn’t care less who her boyfriend is or what her politics are. But to suddenly turn around and whitewash years of abuse is inexcusable. Gaslighting actual abuse victims by downplaying their trauma and equating it with “hurt feelings”—especially with such a large platform—is an unconscionable violation, especially knowing herself the results of such toxicity. (Ella Dawson, a sexual health writer who has written several times about her own online harassment and the topic more generally, tells me, “I’m really surprised to see Laci using this line of argument when she herself has received so much harassment and abuse in the decade she’s been making videos.”)

Laci Green’s popular YouTube channel

Green and others in her newfound camp often claim that this is an issue of protected dissent and free speech. But it’s hard to imagine any contexts in which sending death threats or telling a Jewish woman to “get in an oven,” or even labelling someone a “sociopath,” can be taken as simple “civil dissent” — especially considering how abusive language can and does manifest as physical threats.

Green’s change of heart has, unsurprisingly, incited a backlash of outrage from many who fight for social justice — and at times, problematically, this has veered itself into abuse, with people sending misogynistic slurs in Green’s direction and doxing her private identity information. But while responses like these are dangerous and should not be condoned, creating a respectful dialogue around Green’s dramatic shift is perfectly fair.

Since YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook continue to choose the path of least resistance concerning online harassment, it’s up to us to provide love and support to those on the receiving end. Laci Green was doing that with her words, actions, and her Facebook group. It’s distressing to see her change her mind — while endorsing abuse that has harmed far too many for far too long.